What’s New?

Amazon RDS now Supports MySQL 5.6 with Memcached and Binary Log Access

We are excited to announce MySQL 5.6 support for Amazon RDS. Starting today, you can launch new RDS database instances running MySQL 5.6 with just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console. Amazon RDS for MySQL delivers several important benefits to MySQL customers including ease of deployment, high availability with automatic failure detection and failover, read replicas, push button scalability, automated back-ups, point-in-time restore and automated software upgrades and patching.

New features in MySQL 5.6
With the push button deployment provided by Amazon RDS, you can now easily take advantage of several new MySQL 5.6 features including a few highlighted below:

• Crash safe slaves (Read Replicas): MySQL 5.6 enables Read Replicas to be more crash safe by making the binlog and table data transactionally consistent, so that Read Replicas can resume replication automatically after a master database instance crashes or fails over (in the case of Multi-AZ instances).
• InnoDB integration with Memcached: With MySQL 5.6, you can use the Memcached API to interact with InnoDB data directly as a "key-value" store and bypass the SQL layer in the process. You can enable Memcached on your Amazon RDS for MySQL instance via the DB Option Group functionality.
• Binary Log access: MySQL 5.6 allows downloading and streaming binary logs through the native mysqlbinlog tool. This can be useful for a variety of purposes such as synching data with an on-premises deployment, audit logging, analytics, and debugging of replication errors. In order to take advantage of this feature, the RDS database instance must have backup retention enabled. Review the "Accessing MySQL 5.6 Binary Logs" section of the User Guide to learn more.
• Online schema changes: This is one of the most awaited features of MySQL 5.6 and enables you to perform several "ALTER TABLE" operations (for InnoDB tables) such as adding a column or an index in-place while allowing queries on the table concurrently.
• Full Text Indexes: With MySQL 5.6, you can build full text indexes (for InnoDB tables) on columns with text based content to speed up searches for words/phrases.

Launch new MySQL 5.6 instances now
To create a new MySQL 5.6 database instance, just use the "Launch DB Instance Wizard" in the AWS Management Console and select the DB Engine Version 5.6.12.

Learn more by visiting the MySQL section of the Amazon RDS User Guide and the release notes for MySQL 5.6.

CentOS 6.4 now available on AWS Marketplace

The latest version of the popular open source operating system CentOS is now available on AWS Marketplace. 1-Click deploy on multiple EC2 instance types and regions. Visit the CentOS 6.4 product page to learn more.

Amazon Route 53 Announces CloudWatch Metrics for Health Checks and DNS Failover

We are excited to announce the release of Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Route 53 health checks. Starting today, you can use CloudWatch to view the status of your Route 53 health checks, and you can set CloudWatch Alarms and configure notifications based on health check results. Now, in addition to using Route 53 DNS Failover and health checks to increase the availability of your website, you can also use Route 53 health checks for website monitoring.

When you configure Route 53 health checks, the result of each health check is now automatically published as a CloudWatch metric. Using CloudWatch, you can easily see the status of a health check before using it in your DNS Failover configuration, and you can also view graphs showing the history of your health check’s results.

Getting started with Route 53 is easy, and there are no upfront costs. See the Route 53 product page for full details and pricing. To get started with DNS Failover for Route 53, visit the Route 53 product page or review our walkthrough in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

Also, please feel free to join our webinar at 10:00 am PDT on July 9, 2013 to learn more about DNS Failover and the high-availability architecture options that it makes possible.

Announcing a new AWS Direct Connect location in Dublin

We are thrilled to announce a new AWS Direct Connect location in Dublin supporting the AWS EU (Dublin) region.

You can use AWS Direct Connect to create a dedicated network connection from your datacenter, office, or colocation environment to AWS. Connections are always made to a particular Direct Connect location, and can run at either 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps.

Instructions on how to set up AWS Direct Connect are available in our AWS Direct Connect Users Guide. Sign in to your AWS Management Console to order AWS Direct Connect today!

Amazon RDS now supports point-and-click upgrade from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5

We are pleased to announce that you can now upgrade existing MySQL database instances from MySQL 5.1 to MySQL 5.5 using the Major Version Upgrade feature.

MySQL 5.5 offers several feature and performance benefits over MySQL 5.1 for many customers. Some of the improvements include enhanced multi-core scaling, better use of I/O capacity, and enhanced monitoring through the performance schema. Additionally, InnoDB Plugin 1.1 (which is the default storage engine for MySQL 5.5 on Amazon RDS) has several improvements over InnoDB Plugin 1.0 (which is the default storage engine for MySQL 5.1 on Amazon RDS). These improvements include faster recovery, multiple buffer pool instances and asynchronous I/O.

We encourage you to read the release notes, test your applications for compatibility, and upgrade to MySQL 5.5. To upgrade, all you need to do is perform a few clicks on the AWS Management Console. Just select the “Modify” option corresponding to the DB Instance you want to upgrade, choose the latest version of the MySQL 5.5 (you will not be able to upgrade to earlier versions of MySQL 5.5) and proceed with the wizard. The upgrade will be applied either immediately (if you selected the Apply Immediately option) or during your next maintenance window (default). Please note that in either case, your database instance will have an availability impact for a few minutes as the upgrade completes and your database instance is rebooted. Review the Upgrading a DB Instance section of the Amazon RDS User Guide to learn more.

Amazon SQS and SNS Announce 256KB Large Payloads

Today, we are increasing the maximum allowed payload size for the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) from 64 KB to 256 KB. We are also adding a new option to deliver SNS messages in raw format, in addition to the existing JSON format. This is useful if you are using SNS in conjunction with SQS transmit identical copies of a message to multiple queues. Here is more information about these new features:

• 256KB Payloads (SQS and SNS) enable developers to send and receive more data with each API call. Previously, payloads were capped at 64KB. Now, large payloads are billed as one request per 64KB 'chunk' of payload. For example, a single API call for a 256KB payload will be billed as four requests. Our customers tell us larger payloads will enable new use cases that were previously difficult to accomplish.
• SNS Raw Message Delivery enables developers to pack even more information content into their messaging payloads. When delivering notifications to SQS and HTTP endpoints, SNS today adds JSON encoding with metadata about the current message and topic. Now, developers can set the optional "RawMessageDelivery" property to disable this added JSON encoding. Raw message delivery is off by default, to ensure existing applications continue to behave as expected.

Jaspersoft Promo - $175 EC2 Credit

AWS customers who are new to Jaspersoft on AWS Marketplace will receive $175 of EC2 Promotional credit if they use at least 200 hours between June 15th and July 31st, 2013. Visit the Jaspersoft Reporting and Analytics page on Marketplace to learn more.

Amazon Announces Faster Cross-region EBS Snapshot Copy

We are excited to announce a performance enhancement to EBS Snapshot Copy, making it faster to copy snapshots across AWS regions. Starting today, we will only transfer the data that has changed since your last snapshot copy, thus transferring and storing less data and completing the copy faster.

Last December, we launched EBS Snapshot Copy to accelerate your geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery. With this enhancement, snapshot copies take even less time to complete. You can now make more frequent copies to other regions, making it easier for you to develop highly available applications.

You can copy a snapshot by simply selecting it in the AWS Management Console, setting the destination region and starting the copy. You can also access it via the EC2 Command Line Interface or the EC2 API as described on the EBS Snapshot Copy page. The copied snapshots behave the same as other snapshots in the destination region. You will be charged for the data transferred and for the snapshot data stored in the destination region.

This enhancement also improves the performance of EC2 AMI Copy. With EC2 AMI Copy, you can develop your AMIs in one region, and then copy them to other regions to develop a consistent, multi-region deployment.

You can learn more about EBS Snapshot Copy by visiting the Amazon EBS Documentation and about AMI Copy by visiting the EC2 User’s Guide.

Announcing Custom SSL Certificates and Zone Apex Support for CloudFront

Since we launched support for dynamic content in Amazon CloudFront last year, customers have increasingly used the service not just to deliver static objects, but also as a way to improve performance, reliability and security of their entire website. Today, we are excited to announce two more features – Custom SSL Certificates and zone apex support – that make it easier for you to accelerate and deliver your whole website using Amazon CloudFront.

Custom SSL Certificate support lets you deliver content over HTTPS using your own domain name and your own SSL certificate. This helps give visitors to your website lower latency and higher reliability along with the security benefits of CloudFront over an SSL connection that uses your own domain name. You can also configure CloudFront to use HTTPS connections for origin fetches so that your data is encrypted end-to-end from your origin to your end users.

Configuring Custom SSL Certificate support is easy; you don’t need to learn any proprietary code or hire any consultants to configure it for you. Starting today, you can sign up for an invitation to use the Custom SSL Certificate feature by filling out the form on the custom SSL certificate feature page. As soon as we approve your request, you can upload your SSL certificate and use the AWS Management Console to associate it with your CloudFront distributions.

Pricing for Custom SSL Certificates is simple. We charge a fixed monthly fee for each custom SSL certificate you associate with your CloudFront distributions, pro-rated by the hour. As with other CloudFront features, you pay only for what you use and there are no upfront fees or minimum monthly commitments. You can learn more about Custom SSL Certificates by reading the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

Also, starting today you can now use Amazon CloudFront to deliver content from the root domain, or "zone apex" of your website. For example, you can now configure both http://www.example.com and http://example.com to point at the same CloudFront distribution, without the performance penalty or availability risk of managing a redirect service. To use this feature, you create an Amazon Route 53 Alias record to map the root of your domain to your CloudFront distribution. There are no extra fees from Route 53, as Alias queries that are mapped to a CloudFront distribution are provided free of charge. You can start using this feature today by reviewing the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

Learn more about custom SSL certificate and zone apex support by visiting the custom SSL certificate feature page. You can also join our webinar at 10:00 AM Pacific (UTC-7) on June 20th, 2013 to learn more about these features for whole site delivery using Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53.

AWS Free Usage Tier Now Includes RHEL

We are excited to announce that AWS now offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as an option in addition to Linux/UNIX in the Linux free usage tier pool. Free usage tier eligible customers now have the option to run RHEL as part of the 750 hours of free Linux usage each month to test drive RHEL on Amazon EC2.

See the AWS Free Usage Tier Section to learn how to get started with RHEL in the free usage tier, or the Red Hat Section to learn about RHEL on Amazon EC2. You can also get started on AWS Marketplace by launching RHEL via 1-Click. Visit the Resources Section to find Getting Started Guides, development tools, and tutorials, or visit the Community Forums to get your questions answered.

Amazon RDS Lowers On-Demand and Reserved Instance Prices Globally

We are excited to announce today that Amazon RDS is lowering prices globally for Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments. These price reductions follow a series of innovations we have launched recently (described later in this announcement).

We have reduced the On-Demand prices by as much as 18% for MySQL and Oracle BYOL (Bring Your Own License) and 28% for SQL Server BYOL. All of your On-Demand usage will automatically be charged at the new and lower rates effective June 1, 2013.

We have also reduced the Reserved Instance (RI) prices by as much as 27% for MySQL and Oracle BYOL. The new prices apply to Reserved Instance purchases made on or after June 11, 2013. With the new pricing, Reserved Instances will provide savings of up to 76% compared to On-Demand instances, so you may want to take this opportunity to review your usage and decide whether to purchase additional Reserved Instances to take advantage of these savings.

For your quick reference, new On-Demand prices for an M1.Small DB instance, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for an M2.Xlarge DB instance using a 3-Year Heavy Utilization RI are shown in the tables below:

Table 1: Amazon RDS for MYSQL and Oracle BYOL On-Demand Single-AZ Deployment Prices for M1.Small DB Instance

Table 2: Amazon RDS for MYSQL and Oracle BYOL Single-AZ Deployment 3-Year TCO for M2.Xlarge DB Instance

To learn more about our new prices, please visit Amazon RDS Pricing.

Not only do we constantly strive to drive costs down so as to pass those savings on to you, but we also innovate quickly with new features that enable your important use cases. Following is the list of a few key features:

• Up to 30K of Provisioned IOPS to meet the performance needs of I/O-intensive, transactional (OLTP) database workloads.
• Data encryption at-rest using Oracle's Transparent Data Encryption to satisfy enterprise security and compliance requirements.
• Read-replica promotion to enable disaster recovery in the event the master is degraded.
• Point-and-click access to database logs to facilitate troubleshooting of database issues.

These features are used by many of our customers who run production workloads on RDS today. And, last week’s announcement of the RDS Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Multi-AZ database instances was designed to give you additional confidence to run the most demanding and mission critical workloads dependably on RDS.

CloudFormer Now Supports Amazon VPC and More AWS Resources

We are delighted to announce that CloudFormer now supports several additional AWS resources including Amazon VPC resources. CloudFormer is a tool for creating AWS CloudFormation templates from existing resources in your AWS account. AWS CloudFormation provides an easy way for creating and configuring collections of AWS resources.

The CloudFormer tool displays a list of your existing AWS resources and allows you to select the resources to create a CloudFormation template from. The new version of CloudFormer supports all resources currently supported by CloudFormation. Today, we introduced support for the following AWS resources:

• Amazon VPC (VPC, Subnets, RouteTables, Routes, etc.)
• Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Amazon SNS
• Amazon S3 Bucket Policy
• Amazon SQS Queue Policy
• Amazon SNS Topic Policy

Moreover, CloudFormer now has an improved error handling and resource-level error messages. With these improvements, creating a CloudFormation template from existing resources is even simpler.

To learn more about CloudFormer, please visit the CloudFormer documentation. To learn more about AWS CloudFormation, please visit the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

Amazon announces RDS General Availability and Service Level Agreement

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) was designed to simplify one of the most complex of all common IT activities: managing and scaling a relational database while providing fast, predictable performance and high availability.

Amazon RDS in Action
During the last 3.5 years in operation, a lot has happened. Amazon RDS is now being used in mission-critical deployments by tens of thousands of businesses of all sizes. We now process trillions of I/O requests each month for these customers. We're seeing strong adoption in enterprises such as Samsung and Unilever, web-scale applications like Flipboard and Airbnb, and large-scale organizations like NASA JPL and Obama for America.

Amazon RDS Innovation
We have added support for three major database engines (MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server), expanded support to all nine of the AWS Regions, and added more than 50 highly requested features. Following is the list of a few key features:

• Multiple database engines: Support for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server in addition to MySQL.
• Multi-AZ deployments: This feature enables you to create highly available database deployments with synchronous replication across Availability Zones, automatic failure detection, and failover using just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console.
• Read Replicas: This feature makes it easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single database instance for read-heavy database workloads. You can promote a Read Replica to a master as needed and monitor the replication status directly through the AWS Management Console.
• Provisioned IOPS: Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is a storage option designed to deliver fast, predictable, and consistent I/O performance, and is optimized for I/O-intensive, transactional (OLTP) database workloads. You can provision up to 3TB of storage and 30,000 IOPS per database instance.
• Point-and-click access to database logs: You can view and download a variety of database log files to troubleshoot database issues directly using the AWS Management Console.
• DB Notifications via e-mail and SMS: You can subscribe to receive e-mail or SMS notifications when certain database events such as failover, low storage, replication state change etc. occur.

These innovations are powering some of the world’s most popular applications that are used by millions of users.

General Availability and Amazon RDS SLA
We’re officially calling Amazon RDS “Generally Available” after adding several important features as noted above. With the strong level of customer adoption, numerous new features and plenty of operational experience behind us, we also have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Amazon RDS, with 99.95% availability for Multi-AZ database instances on a monthly basis. This SLA is available for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Oracle, which are currently the database engines with Multi-AZ deployment support. If availability falls below 99.95% for your Multi-AZ database instance (which is a maximum of 22 minutes of unavailability for a Multi-AZ database instance per month), you will be eligible to receive service credits. The new Amazon RDS SLA is designed to give you additional confidence to run the most demanding and mission critical workloads dependably in the AWS cloud. You can learn more by visiting the Amazon RDS SLA page.

Amazon EC2 announces four additional instance types in Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of four Amazon EC2 instance types – High Storage (HS1), High I/O (HI1), Cluster Compute (CC2), and High Memory Cluster (CR1) in Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

The four additional EC2 instance types available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) are:

• HS1 instances are optimized for customers whose applications require high sequential read and write performance over very large data sets. HS1 instances provide customers with 16 virtual CPUs (vCPUs), 117 GiB of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage across 24 hard disk drives, delivering over 2.4 Gigabytes per second of sequential I/O performance.
• HI1 instances are optimized for customers whose applications require high random I/O performance. HI1 instances provide customers with 16 virtual CPUs (vCPUs), 60.5 GiB of RAM, and 2 Terabytes of SSD-backed storage capable of delivering over 120,000 random read IOPS.
• CC2 instances are optimized for customers whose applications require high CPU and network performance. CC2 instances provide customers with dual 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors, and 60.5 GiB of RAM.
• CR1 instances are optimized for customers whose applications require memory capacity, in addition to high CPU and network performance. CR1 instances provide customers with dual 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors with NUMA support, and 244 GiB of RAM.

HS1, HI1, CC2, and CR1 instances can be launched into cluster placement groups, enabling low latency, 10 gigabits per second, inter-node network performance.

Amazon EC2 CC2, CR1, HS1 and HI1 instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU West (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) with additional regions coming soon. To learn more visit the Amazon EC2 instance type page.

Amazon Redshift now available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

We are delighted to announce that Amazon Redshift is now available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. The service is optimized for analyzing data sets of several hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and can provide significantly better performance for under $1,000 per terabyte per year, less than one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to you today. Amazon Redshift also frees you from all the muck associated with provisioning, monitoring, backing up, patching, securing, and scaling your data warehouse.

Amazon Redshift is now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU West (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), with additional regions coming soon. To learn more visit the Amazon Redshift detail page.

Amazon Route 53 Adds Elastic Load Balancer Integration for DNS Failover

We are excited to announce that Route 53 DNS Failover now supports Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) endpoints. Starting today, you can use Route 53’s existing health checking and DNS failover features for applications running behind an ELB, to increase redundancy and availability for these apps.

With DNS Failover, Amazon Route 53 can help detect an outage of your website and redirect your end users to alternate locations where your application is operating properly. When you enable this feature, Route 53 uses health checks—regularly making Internet requests to your application’s endpoints from multiple locations around the world—to determine whether each endpoint of your application is up or down.

For ELB endpoints, Route 53 evaluates the health of the load balancer itself and the health of your application running on the EC2 instances behind it. If any part of the stack goes down, Route 53 detects the failure, routes traffic away from the load balancer, and directs traffic to other healthy ELB endpoints. Route 53 DNS Failover also supports EC2 endpoints as well as endpoints located in your own datacenter.

Using Route 53 DNS Failover, you can run your primary application simultaneously in multiple AWS regions around the world. Route 53 automatically removes from service any region where your application is unavailable. You can also take advantage of a simple backup site hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with Route 53 directing users to this backup site in the event that your application becomes unavailable.

Health checks of Amazon ELB endpoints are free, and getting started is easy. To learn more, visit Jeff Barr’s blog post, the Route 53 product page or the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

Also, please feel free to join our webinar at 10:00 am PDT on July 9, 2013 to learn more about DNS Failover and the high-availability architecture options that it makes possible.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Adds Support for Web Identity Federation

We are thrilled to announce that we’ve expanded our identity federation capabilities to support web identity federation. This new feature introduces a new AWS Security Token Service (STS) API, AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity, which you can use to create cloud-backed mobile apps that use public identity providers such as Facebook, Google, or the newly launched Login with Amazon service for authentication. With web identity federation, you have an easy way to integrate Amazon.com, Facebook, or Google sign-in into your apps without having to write any server-side code and without distributing long-term AWS security credentials with the app.

For more information about web identity federation and how to get started, please see Creating Temporary Security Credentials for Mobile Apps Using Public Identity Providers in the AWS STS guide.

Amazon RDS announces an easier way to monitor Read Replicas

We are pleased to announce an easier way to monitor the replication status of your Amazon RDS for MySQL Read Replicas. In addition to the option to connect to your Read Replica and run the Show Slave Status command to review the replication status, you can now view the replication status of your Read Replicas by simply looking at the “Replication State” field on the DB Instances page of the AWS Management Console.

Amazon RDS monitors the replication status of your Read Replicas and updates the Replication State field to Error if replication stops for any reason (e.g., running DML queries on your replica that conflict with the updates made on the master database instance could result in a replication error). You can review the details of the associated error thrown by the MySQL engine by viewing the Replication Error field and take an appropriate action to recover from it. You can learn more about troubleshooting replication issues in the Troubleshooting a Read Replica problem section of the Amazon RDS User Guide. If a replication error is fixed, the Replication State changes to Replicating.

We encourage you to use Amazon RDS Event Notifications to automatically get notified when you encounter a replication error. Separately, you can also monitor the Replication Lag metric and set up a CloudWatch alarm to receive a notification when the lag crosses a particular threshold tolerable by your application. Learn more about monitoring Read Replicas by visiting the Working with Read Replicas section of the Amazon RDS User Guide.

AWS Achieves FedRAMP℠ Compliance

We are excited to announce that AWS has been granted two Agency Authority to Operate (ATOs) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). FedRAMP is a mandatory U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products and services.

Some of the major benefits of FedRAMP for agencies include:

• Significant savings in cost, time and resources
• Risk-based security management
• Enhanced transparency

Already numerous government agencies and other entities that provide systems integration and other products and services to governmental agencies are using the wide range of AWS services today. Now all U.S. government agencies can leverage the AWS HHS ATO packages in the FedRAMP repository to evaluate AWS, provide their own authorizations to use AWS, and transition workloads into the AWS environment.

You can learn more by reading the AWS FedRAMP FAQs.

AWS GovCloud (US) Achieves a FedRAMP℠ Compliant Agency ATO

We are delighted to announce that AWS GovCloud (US) has received an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in compliance with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP^SM). FedRAMP is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

Leveraging the HHS authorization, U.S. government agencies can evaluate AWS GovCloud (US) for their applications and workloads, complete their own authorizations to use AWS, and deploy systems into the AWS environment.

Agencies can immediately request access to the "Amazon Web Services - AWS GovCloud (US) Region" FedRAMP package by submitting a FedRAMP Package Access Request Form using package ID "AGENCYAMAZONGC".

Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on May 21st, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST and the Intro to AWS GovCloud (US) Region webinar on June 12th, 1:30 – 2:30 PM EST to learn more about AWS FedRAMP Compliance.

Please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page and contact us to get started today!

Riverbed Stingray Promo - $175 EC2 Credit

AWS customers who are new to Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager on AWS Marketplace will receive $175 of EC2 Promotional credit if they use at least 200 hours between May 15th and June 30th, 2013. Visit the Stingray Traffic Manager Developer Edition page on Marketplace to learn more.

What’s New: Elastic Load Balancing now supports additional HTTP methods

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) now supports additional HTTP methods specified in requests from client applications. Previously, ELB restricted the set of supported HTTP methods to those commonly used by conventional web applications.

With an increasing number of applications requiring support for new HTTP extensions, customers have indicated that they would like more control over the HTTP methods used by their applications. ELB will now accept all HTTP methods sent to your applications. Some examples of methods you can use include “PATCH” for Ruby on Rails 4+ applications, and “REPORT” or “MKCALENDAR” for CalDAV applications.

To learn more, visit the Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder Announces Seven New Enhancements, Including HLS Support

We’re excited to announce seven new enhancements to Amazon Elastic Transcoder that make it easier for you to encode and deliver your content to a wider set of video devices and players. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is a web service that converts your video files into versions that will play back on devices like smartphones, tablets, PCs and web browsers.

Starting today you can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to output content in three new ways:

• HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) support lets you create videos that play on compatible players for Apple iOS, Android devices, set-top boxes and web browsers. With HLS support, you can now easily deliver your content without a streaming server – just point your users to the video in Amazon S3 or Amazon CloudFront.
• WebM support lets you transcode content into VP8 video and Vorbis audio for playback in browsers, like Firefox, that do not natively support H.264 and AAC.
• MPEG-2 TS output container support lets you output transport streams that are commonly used in broadcast systems.

We’ve also added four features that make it even easier to use Amazon Elastic Transcoder:

• Multiple outputs per job make it easy to create different renditions of the same content. Instead of having to create one transcoding job per rendition, you can now create a single job to produce multiple renditions. For example, with a single job you can create H.264, HLS and WebM versions of the same video for delivery to multiple platforms.
• Automatic video bit rate optimization takes the guesswork out of choosing the right bit rate for your video content. With this feature, Amazon Elastic Transcoder will automatically adjust the bit rate in order to optimize the visual quality of your transcoded output.
• Enhanced aspect ratio and sizing policies make it easier to resize your content to your output frame size. You can use these new settings in transcoding presets to precisely control scaling, cropping, matting and stretching options to get the output that you expect regardless of how the input is formatted.
• Integration with Amazon S3 permissions and storage options lets you set permissions on your output files from within Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Your files are then created with the right permissions in-place, ready for delivery to end-users.

You can learn more about Amazon Elastic Transcoder and these new features by visiting the detail page. To see these new features in action, don’t forget to register for the “What’s New with Amazon Elastic Transcoder” webinar on May 29, 2013 at 10am Pacific time.

Amazon DynamoDB Announces Parallel Scan and Lower-Cost Reads

We are excited to announce the availability of Parallel Scan, a new feature that allows you to access your Amazon DynamoDB data even more quickly than before. In addition, we have made it up to four times cheaper to read large amounts of data out of Amazon DynamoDB. This also reduces the cost of copying your data from Amazon DynamoDB to Amazon Redshift. You can read more about these improvements here.

With Amazon DynamoDB, customers get:

• Fast, predictable performance at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average latencies in the single-digit milliseconds for database operations.
• Durability and high-availability. DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region.
• Seamless scalability. For example, you can easily grow your DynamoDB table from 1,000 writes per second to 100,000 writes per second using the AWS Management Console.
• Easy administration. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed service. You don’t need to worry about hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a reliable, distributed database cluster, or partitioning data over multiple instances as you scale.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.

AWS Management Console in AWS GovCloud (US) adds support for Amazon SWF

We are delighted to announce that the AWS Management Console for the AWS GovCloud (US) region now supports Amazon Simple Workflow (Amazon SWF)!

The AWS GovCloud (US) region is designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The console provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage your AWS GovCloud (US) resources.

Amazon Simple Workflow is a service to coordinate work across multiple machines. With our APIs, ease-of-use libraries, and control engine, you can build multi-step application components that are independent of any single component’s state and progress. This allows you to change and scale your business logic with greater selectivity and ease – across the AWS Cloud or your own data centers.

With Amazon Simple Workflow, there is no need to write your own state machine or infrastructure code. Instead, you can focus on writing the business logic that makes your application unique. The AWS Management Console provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage these powerful capabilities of Amazon SWF. Instructions on how to access the console are available in our Users Guide.

To learn more about the service, please visit the Amazon SWF detail page, the AWS GovCloud (US) home page and contact us to get started!

AWS OpsWorks launches Amazon CloudWatch metrics view

We are excited to announce AWS OpsWorks now offers a convenient view of the Amazon CloudWatch metrics generated by your OpsWorks instances. Without any additional costs or setup you can see thirteen one-minute metrics that provide an overview of the state of your instances. All metrics are automatically collected, grouped, and filtered. You can start with an overview of CPU, memory and load summarized by stack and then drill down to specific layers and instances. All metrics can be used to create alarms via Amazon CloudWatch.

A few clicks in the the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by reading how to use the OpsWorks monitoring view or joining our AWS OpsWorks webinar on May 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST.

AWS OpsWorks supports Elastic Load Balancing

We are excited to announce developers can now add Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to their OpsWorks application stacks and get all the built-in capabilities ELB is known for, including:

• Elastic Load Balancing automatically scales its request handling capacity in response to incoming application traffic.
• SSL certificates are stored using IAM credentials, allowing you to control who can see your private keys.
• Elastic Load Balancing spans multiple AZs for reliability, but provides a single DNS name for simplicity.
• Elastic Load Balancing metrics such as request count and request latency are reported by Amazon CloudWatch.
• By default, Elastic Load Balancing supports SSL termination at the Load Balancer, including offloading SSL decryption from application instances, centralized management of SSL certificates, and encryption to back-end instances with optional public key authentication.

A few clicks in the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by reading the OpsWorks documentation or joining our AWS OpsWorks webinar on May 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST.

AWS Direct Connect location in Seattle and access to AWS GovCloud (US) now available

We are delighted to make two important announcements today - a new AWS Direct Connect location in Seattle supporting the AWS US West (Oregon) region and support for AWS Direct Connect to the AWS GovCloud (US) region from any AWS Direct Connect location are both now available!

You can use AWS Direct Connect to create a dedicated network connection from your datacenter, office, or colocation environment to AWS. Connections are always made to a particular Direct Connect location, and can run at either 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps.

Instructions on how to set up AWS Direct Connect are available in our AWS Direct Connect Users Guide. For AWS GovCloud (US) access, please see the AWS GovCloud (US) Users Guide.

Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on May 14th, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST to learn more about AWS Direct Connect for the AWS GovCloud (US) region.

Sign in to your AWS Management Console to order AWS Direct Connect today!

Announcing AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center

We are excited to announce the AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center. The AWS Management Pack enables you to view and monitor your AWS resources directly in the System Center Operations Manager console. This way, you can use a single, familiar console to monitor all your resources, whether they are on-premises or in the AWS cloud.

The AWS Management Pack gives you a consolidated view of your AWS resources across regions and Availability Zones. It also has built-in integration with Amazon CloudWatch so that the metrics and alarms defined in Amazon CloudWatch surface as performance counters and alerts in Operations Manager. With the AWS Management Pack, you can gain a deep insight into the health and performance of your applications running within the Amazon EC2 instances. The diagram view generated by the management pack makes it easy to traverse between the application and the infrastructure hosting it, with just a few clicks.

The AWS Management Pack is available for “System Center 2012 – Operations Manager” and “System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2”.

To learn more or download the AWS Management Pack, visit https://aws.amazon.com/windows/system-center/.

Raising the bar: Amazon announces 4,000 IOPS per EBS Volume and Provisioned IOPS products on AWS Marketplace

We are excited to announce support for up to 4,000 IOPS per Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volume. This represents a fourfold increase from the original Provisioned IOPS volume performance since its launch last year. Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to provide predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads such as databases, distributed file systems and other enterprise applications; all of which are available on AWS Marketplace.

You can get up to 4,000 IOPS from one volume. For performance beyond 4,000 IOPS, you can attach and stripe multiple volumes to deliver thousands of IOPS to your application. You can set the level of performance you need and EBS will consistently deliver it over the lifetime of the volume. To enable your Amazon EC2 instance to fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, we recommend launching them as "EBS-optimized" instances, which deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS. The EBS-optimized option is currently available for our m1.large, m1.xlarge, m2.2xlarge, m2.4xlarge, m3.xlarge, m3.2xlarge and c1.xlarge instance types.

One way to get started with Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS is to launch a product from AWS Marketplace with 1-Click. AWS Marketplace is an online store where you can find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS such as high-performance versions of MongoDB, NuoDB and OrangeFS. You can learn more about these products on the AWS Marketplace Provisioned IOPS information page.

Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, EBS-optimized instances and AWS Marketplace products are now supported in all AWS regions except GovCloud. For more information on using Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, please see the Amazon EC2 Developer Guide.

Announcing General Availability of the AWS SDK for Node.js

We are excited to announce the General Availability (GA) release of the AWS SDK for Node.js. This SDK enables developers to tap into the cost-effective, scalable, and reliable AWS cloud from their Node.js applications. Since releasing the Developer Preview of the AWS SDK for Node.js in December, we expanded support to cover the full set of AWS services, collaborated with the community to fine tune the SDK design patterns, and added a few new features. The latest SDK now supports proxy servers, IAM roles on EC2 instances, and optionally using a Stream interface on operations.

This release moves the SDK to a stable API. Read the Getting Started Guide to begin using the SDK in your Node.js project.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) now supports S3 Server Side Encryption

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) now supports S3 Server Side Encryption. This feature is useful for any customers that need to move or process large amounts of sensitive data. S3 Server Side Encryption (S3 SSE) makes it easy to encrypt data stored at rest in S3. With S3 SSE, every S3 object is encrypted with a unique key; the key itself is encrypted with a regularly rotated master key. Decryption happens automatically when data is retrieved. S3DistCp is an EMR feature that uses MapReduce to efficiently move large amounts of data from S3 into HDFS, from HDFS to S3, and between S3 buckets. EMR S3DistCp now supports S3 SSE.

To learn more about this feature, please visit EMR’s Developer Guide.

Announcing New Edge Location in Seoul, Korea for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53

We are excited to announce the launch of our newest edge location in Seoul, Korea to serve end users of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. This is our first edge location in Korea and each new edge location helps to lower latency and improve performance for your end users. We plan to continue to add new edge locations worldwide.

If you’re already using Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53, you don't need to do anything to your applications as requests are automatically routed to this location when appropriate.

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. Amazon Route 53 is designed to be fast, easy to use, and cost-effective. It answers DNS queries with low latency by using a global network of DNS servers. Queries for your domain are automatically routed to the nearest DNS server, and thus answered with the best possible performance.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no required minimum commitments.

We’d also like to invite you to join our “Whole Site Delivery with Amazon CloudFront” webinar on May 16th at 10:00AM Pacific Time. In this webinar, we’ll demonstrate how you can use Amazon CloudFront to help architect your site to deliver both static and dynamic content (portions of your site that change for each end-user). You can register here for this webinar.

Like all Amazon CloudFront edge locations, our Seoul edge location supports all Amazon CloudFront features. With the addition of this location, Amazon CloudFront now has a total of 40 edge locations worldwide.

To learn more, please visit the detail page for Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53.

Announcing Amazon Web Services Global Certification Program

We are excited to announce the launch of the Amazon Web Services Global Certification Program. AWS Certifications designate individuals who demonstrate knowledge, skills and proficiency with AWS services. This program is built around the three primary roles for engineering teams delivering cloud-based solutions: Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, and Developer. Role-based certification credentials can be earned on three proficiency levels: Associate, Professional and Master.

AWS certifications are designed to certify the technical skills and knowledge associated with best practices for building secure and reliable cloud-based applications using AWS technology. To earn an AWS Certification, individuals must prove their proficiency by passing an exam. Exams are administered through Kryterion testing centers in more than 100 countries and 750 testing locations worldwide. Once achieved, individuals can display the AWS Certified logo on business cards and resumes to gain visibility for their AWS expertise while fostering credibility with employers and peers.

The first certification to be offered is the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Level,” which certifies skills for technical professionals and solutions architects involved in the design and development of applications on AWS. Additional role-based certifications, including certifications for Systems Operations (SysOps) Administrators and Developers, will follow later this year.

To learn more about the AWS Certification Program, visit http://aws.amazon.com/certification.

AWS OpsWorks now supports more Amazon EC2 instance types including the micro instance

We are excited to announce the addition of Amazon EBS-backed Amazon EC2 instances to give users more instance types to choose for their development needs, including the AWS Free Usage Tier-eligible micro instance. Users now have the ability to use micro instances to reduce costs in development environments as well as larger instance types such as the second generation M3 family for applications that demand more performance. See offer terms for more details and other restrictions on the AWS Free Usage Tier.

A few clicks in the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by reading our documentation walk-through.

AWS Marketplace Applications Now Available With 1-Click Deployment In Sydney

AWS Marketplace applications are now available to all customers using the AWS Sydney Region with 1-Click Deployment for building solutions and running their businesses. Customers can easily find, compare, and immediately start using the software listed in AWS Marketplace, and experience lower latency when deploying in Sydney. Over 100 software products for production, testing and development purposes are currently available, including MongoDB, aiCache, Citrix Netscaler, F5, MicroStrategy and others. Sellers continually add new AWS Marketplace products for deployment the AWS Sydney Region. For more information or to find software on AWS Marketplace, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.

AWS Management Console now available for AWS GovCloud (US)

We are delighted to announce that the AWS Management Console is now available for access to the AWS GovCloud (US) region!

When you sign in using the AWS GovCloud (US) specific login page, the console provides access to your AWS GovCloud (US) resources and is completely isolated from other AWS regions. The console provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to manage your AWS GovCloud (US) resources. Consoles available today are Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS. The Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR and Amazon SWF consoles will be coming soon.

Instructions on how to access the console are available in our Users Guide.

Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on April 30th, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST for a live demonstration of the console and to learn more about AWS GovCloud (US). Also, register now for the Intro to AWS GovCloud (US) Region Webinar on May 15, 1:30 – 2:30 PM EST.

To learn more, please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page and contact us to get started!

Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances available in EU West (Ireland)

We are thrilled to announce that Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances are now available in EU West (Ireland).

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. The service is optimized for analyzing data sets of several hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and can provide significantly better performance for less than one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to you today. Amazon Redshift also frees you from all the muck associated with provisioning, monitoring, backing up, patching, securing, and scaling your data warehouse.

High Storage Instances (hs1.8xlarge) are an Amazon EC2 instance type that is ideal for customers whose applications require high sequential read and write performance over very large data sets. High Storage instances provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117 GiB of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage across 24 hard disk drives, delivering over 2.4 Gigabytes per second of sequential I/O performance.

Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon) and EU West (Ireland), with additional regions coming soon. To learn more visit the Amazon Redshift detail page and the Amazon EC2 instance type page.

Amazon DynamoDB Announces Support for Local Secondary Indexes

We are thrilled to announce that we have expanded the query capabilities of DynamoDB. We call the newest capability Local Secondary Indexes (LSI). While DynamoDB already allows you to perform low-latency queries based on your table’s primary key, even at tremendous scale, LSI will now give you the ability to perform fast queries against other attributes (or columns) in your table. This gives you the ability to perform richer queries while still meeting the low-latency demands of responsive, scalable applications.

With LSI we expand DynamoDB’s existing query capabilities with support for more complex queries. Customers can now create indexes on non-primary key attributes and quickly retrieve records within a hash partition (i.e., items that share the same hash value in their primary key).

The enhanced query flexibility that local secondary indexes provide means DynamoDB can support an even broader range of workloads. At Amazon, we have already come to start with DynamoDB as the default choice for every application that does not require the flexibility of relational databases like Oracle or MySQL. Customers tell us they’re adopting the same practice, particularly in the areas of digital advertising, social gaming and connected device applications where high availability, seamless scalability, predictable performance and low latency are very critical.

Today, local secondary indexes must be defined at the time you create your DynamoDB tables. In the future, we plan to provide you with an ability to add or drop LSI for existing tables. If you want to equip an existing DynamoDB table to local secondary indexes immediately, you can export the data from your existing table using Elastic Map Reduce, and import it to a new table with LSI.

Local secondary indexes are available today in all regions except GovCloud. You can get started with DynamoDB and Local Secondary Indexes by reading the developer guide.

Amazon RDS for Oracle Now Supports Transparent Data Encryption and Native Network Encryption

We have good news to share. Many of you have told us that data encryption, at rest and in transit, is very important to you as you move mission-critical database workloads to Amazon RDS. Today, Amazon RDS is announcing support for Oracle’s Transparent Data Encryption and Native Network Encryption in all regions. Both of these features are components of Oracle’s Advanced Security option for the Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition. Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition is available on Amazon RDS for Oracle under the Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) model. There is no additional charge to use these features.

Oracle Transparent Data Encryption encrypts data before it is written to storage, and automatically decrypts data when reading from storage. Oracle Transparent Data Encryption enables you to encrypt table spaces or specific table columns using industry standard encryption algorithms such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Data Encryption Standard (Triple DES). Oracle Native Network Encryption encrypts the data as it moves into and out of the database. Oracle Native Network Encryption enables you to encrypt network traffic travelling over Oracle Net Service using industry standard encryption algorithms such as AES and Triple DES.

To learn more about using Oracle Transparent Data Encryption and Native Network Encryption on Amazon RDS for Oracle, please visit our User Documentation

Citrix NetScaler Promo - $175 EC2 Credit

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Supports IAM Roles

We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. Elastic Beanstalk makes it easy to deploy and run your applications on AWS, and with IAM roles, these applications can securely access AWS services. IAM roles manage the muck of securely distributing your AWS access keys out to your EC2 instances that have been launched through Elastic Beanstalk.

When creating new environments using the Elastic Beanstalk console or using the eb command line, Elastic Beanstalk can automatically create an IAM role. You can also create and assign existing roles to Elastic Beanstalk environments.

You can easily grant additional permissions to this role to allow your application to access AWS services such as Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon S3. To learn more about IAM roles and Elastic Beanstalk, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

AWS Storage Gateway Now Supports Microsoft Hyper-V

The AWS Storage Gateway helps you connect your on-premises IT environment with the AWS cloud. Today, we are excited to announce support for running the AWS Storage Gateway on an additional virtualization platform, Microsoft Hyper-V.

You can use the AWS Storage Gateway in two configurations. Gateway-Cached volumes provide local, low-latency access to your most frequently used files while storing all your data in Amazon S3’s elastic, highly durable storage infrastructure. Gateway-Stored volumes provide scheduled off-site backups to Amazon S3 for your on-premises data. With support for Microsoft Hyper-V in addition to already-supported VMware ESXi, you can now run the AWS Storage Gateway on two of the most popular virtualization platforms.

Learn more and get started by visiting the AWS Storage Gateway User Guide.

AWS GovCloud (US) Region Announces Amazon EMR

We are thrilled to announce that Amazon EMR is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region!

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a web service that makes it easy to process or analyze vast amounts of data using Hadoop in the AWS cloud. Using Amazon EMR, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters.

The AWS GovCloud (US) Region was built with Government customers in mind. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

The AWS GovCloud (US) Region adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements. You can run workloads, including all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and government oriented publically available data, in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Depending on your requirements, you can also run unclassified workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) region to utilize the unique capabilities of this region.

Join us for our weekly AWS GovCloud (US) Region Office Hours on April 16th, 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST which will feature a guest speaker from the Amazon EMR team. Also, register now for the Intro to AWS GovCloud (US) Region webinar on May 15, 1:30 – 2:30 PM EST.

To learn more, please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page, read about our Public Sector case studies, and contact us to get started!

AWS Elastic Beanstalk for .NET Supports Amazon VPC and Configuration Files

We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk for .NET now supports configuration files as well as integration with Amazon VPC and Amazon RDS. AWS Elastic Beanstalk for .NET allows you to easily run and manage your .NET applications on AWS using Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012.

Using configuration files, you can setup software on Amazon EC2 instances within your environment, without having to create a custom AMI. For example, you can install and configure Windows services to run on the same instances as your web application. You can also use configuration files to provision resources such as an Amazon DynamoDB table, an Amazon CloudWatch alarm, or an Amazon SQS queue. To learn more about configuration files, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

Elastic Beanstalk .NET environments now seamlessly integrate with Amazon RDS and can also run inside existing VPCs. Using Amazon VPC, you can now easily deploy private .NET web applications including intranet web applications and web service backends. To learn more about deploying your Elastic Beanstalk application in a VPC or connecting to RDS, visit "Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon VPC" and "Using Amazon RDS" in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

Announcing Price Reduction for Windows On-Demand EC2 Instances

We are excited to announce a price reduction of up to 26% on Windows On-Demand EC2 instances. Today’s price drop continues the AWS tradition of exploring ways to reduce costs and passing on the savings to our customers. This reduction applies to the Standard (m1), Second-Generation Standard (m3), High-Memory (m2), and High-CPU (c1) instance families. All prices are automatically effective from April 1, 2013.

As an example, a typical Microsoft Windows Application Server running on an m1 large On-Demand instance in US East (N. Virginia) would now cost only $0.364 per hour instead of $0.460 per hour– a 20% drop in price, which translates into more than $2000 in quarterly savings for running 10 such instances. The size of the reduction varies by instance family and region. We encourage you to visit the AWS Windows page for more information about Windows pricing on AWS.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Adds Support for Variables in Access Control Policies

We are excited to announce that we have extended the access policy language to include support for policy variables. This new feature allows you to define general purpose policies that include variables so you do not have to explicitly list all the components of the policy.

For example, you can now use variables such as ‘username’ to create policies that lock down users’ access to a specific S3 folder determined by their username, or allow users to manage their own access keys and assign the policy to a group instead of assigning an individual policy to each user. This will simplify your policy management by reducing the number of policies necessary to grant individualized access control to AWS resources.

For more information about the access control language and policy variables, please visit the Policy Variables section of the Using IAM guide. To get started please visit the AWS Management Console

Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances available in US West (Oregon)

We are thrilled to announce that Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances are now available in US West (Oregon).

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. The service is optimized for analyzing data sets of several hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and can provide significantly better performance for less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, less than one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to you today. Amazon Redshift also frees you from all the muck associated with provisioning, monitoring, backing up, patching, securing, and scaling your data warehouse.

High Storage Instances (hs1.8xlarge) are an Amazon EC2 instance type that is ideal for customers whose applications require high sequential read and write performance over very large data sets. High Storage instances provide customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of compute capacity, 117 GiB of RAM, and 48 Terabytes of storage across 24 hard disk drives, delivering over 2.4 Gigabytes per second of sequential I/O performance.

Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 High Storage Instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with additional regions coming soon. To learn more visit the Amazon Redshift detail page and the Amazon EC2 instance type page.

Announcing New Lower Request Pricing for Amazon S3

We are excited to announce that we are reducing Amazon S3 request prices in all nine of our regions. We are lowering the prices for GET requests by 60% and the prices for PUT, LIST, COPY, and POST requests by 50%. For example, in the US Standard Region, we are reducing the price of every 1,000 PUT requests from $0.01 to $0.005 and the price of every 10,000 GET requests from $0.01 to $0.004.

We are happy to pass along these savings to you as we continue to drive down our costs. The new lower prices for all regions can be found on the Amazon S3 pricing page. New prices are effective April 1st and will be applied to your bill for all requests on or after this date.

Announcing AWS CloudHSM

We are excited to announce AWS CloudHSM, a new service enabling customers to increase data security and meet compliance requirements by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS Cloud. The CloudHSM service allows customers to securely generate, store and manage cryptographic keys used for data encryption in a way that keys are accessible only by the customer.

AWS provides a variety of solutions for protecting sensitive data within the AWS platform. But for some applications and data subject to rigorous contractual or regulatory mandates for managing cryptographic keys, additional protection is necessary. Until now, organizations’ only options were to maintain data in on-premises datacenters or deploy local HSMs to protect encrypted data in the cloud. Unfortunately, those options either prevented customers from migrating their most sensitive data to the cloud or significantly slowed application performance.

With AWS CloudHSM, customers maintain full ownership, control and access to keys and sensitive data while Amazon manages the HSM appliances in close proximity to their applications and data for maximum performance. For more information about Amazon HSM, visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/.

Adobe ColdFusion now on AWS Marketplace

Adobe ColdFusion 10 on AWS Marketplace is an easy and affordable way to access powerful yet easy-to-use features to build high performing, enterprise-ready applications that scale dynamically to meet your business needs. Easily create interactive web applications leveraging unique built-in HTML5 support. 1-Click deploy running on Windows Server or Ubuntu.

Announcing EBS-Optimized Support for Additional Instance Types

We are excited to announce the global availability of EBS-optimized support for four additional instance types: m3.xlarge, m3.2xlarge, m2.2xlarge, and c1.xlarge. EBS-optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options between 500 Megabits per second and 1,000 Megabits per second depending on the instance type used.

EBS-optimized instances are designed for use with both Standard and Provisioned IOPS EBS volumes. Standard volumes deliver 100 IOPS on average with a best effort ability to burst to hundreds of IOPS, making them well-suited for workloads with moderate and bursty I/O needs. When attached to an EBS-optimized instance, Provisioned IOPS volumes are designed to consistently deliver up to 2000 IOPS from a single volume, making them ideal for I/O intensive workloads such as databases.

For more information on Amazon EBS-optimized EC2 instances, please see the Amazon EC2 detail page.

AWS GovCloud (US) Region Announces Amazon SWF

We are delighted to announce that Amazon Simple Workflow is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region!

Amazon Simple Workflow provides customers with the building blocks and processing engine to handle the complexity of application infrastructure programming and state machinery. This lets customers focus on the business logic that makes them unique. By using Simple Workflow to assemble applications with multiple interrelated steps, customers get cluster-wide functionality to coordinate tasks, manage the state of processes, retry on failed steps, and distribute task load.

Customers are using Simple Workflow’s building blocks to: create SaaS analytics platforms, process big data, transcode video, manage web-based orders, train machine learning algorithms, deploy enterprise mobile assets, distribute mobile media, manage data center deployments, optimize on-line advertising, and much more.

The AWS GovCloud (US) Region was built with Government customers in mind. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The AWS GovCloud (US) Region adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements. You can run workloads, including all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and government oriented publically available data, in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Depending on your requirements, you can also run unclassified workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) region to utilize the unique capabilities of this region.

To learn more, please visit our AWS GovCloud (US) home page, read about our Public Sector case studies, and contact us to get started!

Amazon RDS for SQL Server Now Supports Upgrading from SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012

• Contained database – a database that is isolated from other SQL Server databases including system databases like the ‘master’ database. This simplifies the task of moving databases from one instance of SQL Server to another by removing dependencies to other SQL Server databases.
• Columnstore index – a new type of index for data warehouse type queries. Columnstore indexes can greatly reduce I/O and memory utilization on large queries.
• Sequence object – an object that acts as a counter similar to SQL Server’s identity column, but is not restricted to a single table.
• User-defined roles – a new role management system in SQL Server 2012 which allows users to create custom server roles.

Amazon RDS now supports 3TB and 30,000 Provisioned IOPS per database instance

We have three pieces of good news to share. First, you can provision up to 3 TB in storage and up to 30,000 IOPS for your database instances (maximum realized IOPS will vary by engine type). Second, you can convert an existing Amazon RDS instance that uses standard storage to use Provisioned IOPS storage. Finally, you can scale IOPS and storage independently. All three features are enabled for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Oracle database engines. Here are the details:

Provision up to 3TB storage and 30,000 IOPS: You can now provision up to 3TB storage and 30,000 IOPS per database instance – three times the previous limit of 1 TB and 10,000 IOPS per database instance. For a workload with 50% writes and 50% reads running on an m2.4xlarge instance, you can realize up to 25,000 IOPS for Oracle and 12,500 IOPS for MySQL. However, by provisioning up to 30,000 IOPS, you may be able to achieve lower latency and higher throughput. Your actual realized IOPS may vary from the amount you provisioned based on your database workload, instance type, and database engine choice. Refer to the Factors That Affect Realized IOPS section of the documentation to learn more.

Convert an existing database instance to use Provisioned IOPS storage: You can now convert database instances using standard storage to use Provisioned IOPS storage and get consistent throughput and low I/O latencies. Use the "Modify" action for your database instance on the DB Instances page of the AWS Management Console, check the "Use Provisioned IOPS" check box, specify the number of IOPS required for your workload, and proceed through the wizard. You can also perform this operation via the Amazon RDS APIs and the Command Line Interface.

Scale storage and IOPS independently: You can now scale IOPS (in increments of 1000) and storage independently. The ratio of IOPS provisioned to the storage requested (in GB) should be between 3 and 10. For example, for a database instance with 1000 GB of storage, you can provision from 3,000 to 10,000 IOPS. You can scale the IOPS up or down depending on factors such as seasonal variability of traffic to your applications.

Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS is available in all AWS Regions except GovCloud. To learn more and get started with Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS, please refer to the Working with Provisioned IOPS storage section of the Amazon RDS User Guide.

You are also invited to attend the webinar Amazon RDS - Running low admin, high performance databases in the cloud with the Amazon RDS team on March 27th, where you can learn more about Provisioned IOPS storage and how customers are using it to successfully run high performance applications. Register here.

Amazon ElastiCache now in Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, global expansion of M3 cache nodes, and price reduction in select regions

We are excited to share three announcements today that give you more flexibility and lower costs when deploying Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed, in-memory, Memcached-compatible caching service.

1. Amazon ElastiCache availability in Sydney. Starting today, customers can use Amazon ElastiCache clusters for their scale-out caching needs in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. Sydney joins Singapore and Tokyo as the third Region in Asia Pacific and as the ninth Region worldwide.
2. Global expansion of enhanced (M3) cache nodes. The enhanced (M3) cache nodes, built on the next generation AWS infrastructure, are now available in all regions except AWS GovCloud.
3. Reduced cache node pricing. We have reduced prices of M1 cache nodes in the US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), and South America (São Paulo) Regions. As a result, the m1.small cache node is now 19% cheaper in these regions. In addition, we reduced prices for M2, M3 and C1 cache nodes in the South America (São Paulo) region.

Amazon ElastiCache improves the performance of your web applications by retrieving data from a fast, in-memory cache instead of relying entirely on disk-based storage. Unlike other caching mechanisms, Amazon ElastiCache is fully managed so you don’t have to worry about maintaining your own caching infrastructure. In addition, it is Memcached-compatible, so existing Memcached-enabled applications should work with ElastiCache without any code changes.

To learn more about the service, please see our recent presentation from the first AWS re:Invent Conference, and review the Getting Started Guide. You can launch a cache cluster with a few clicks using the AWS Management Console or a few simple API calls. For more information about the new cache node types and prices, please visit the Amazon ElastiCache page.

Announcing AMI Copy for Amazon EC2

Announcing AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Node.js

We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Node.js applications. Elastic Beanstalk already makes it easier to quickly deploy and manage Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and .NET applications on AWS. Now, Elastic Beanstalk offers the same functionality for Node.js applications.

Elastic Beanstalk for Node.js supports a wide number of configuration settings to help you customize the environment for your application. You can easily configure HTTP or TCP load balancing, configure the version and command to launch your Node.js application, and improve performance by offloading static content handling to Apache or Nginx.

To get started using Elastic Beanstalk for Node.js, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide. Also check out the walkthroughs for how to deploy Express and Geddy applications on Elastic Beanstalk.

Using Elastic Beanstalk, you can seamlessly integrate your application with Amazon RDS. You can also use configuration files to customize your Amazon EC2 instances or to provision additional AWS resources such as Amazon DynamoDB tables and Amazon ElastiCache clusters. To learn more about customizing your Elastic Beanstalk environment, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

SAP Hana One Promo - $120 AWS Credit

AWS customers who are new to SAP Hana One on the AWS Marketplace will receive $120 of AWS Promotion Credit if they use at least 10 hours of SAP Hana One between February 18 and March 31, 2013. Visit the SAP Hana One product page on Marketplace to learn more.

Amazon DynamoDB Reduces Prices

We are excited to announce a reduction in Amazon DynamoDB pricing in all AWS regions. The price of indexed data storage has decreased by up to 75%. The price of provisioned throughput capacity has decreased by up to 35%.

We have also introduced a new Reserved Capacity offering. Reserved Capacity pricing offers significant savings over the normal price of DynamoDB provisioned throughput capacity. When you buy Reserved Capacity, you pay a one-time upfront fee and commit to paying for a minimum usage level for the duration of the Reserved Capacity term. Using Reserved Capacity pricing, you can save up to 53% with a 1-year term and up to 76% with a 3-year term.

With Amazon DynamoDB, customers get:

• Fast, predictable performance at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average latencies in the single-digit milliseconds for database operations.
• Durability and high-availability. DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region.
• Seamless scalability. For example, you can easily grow your DynamoDB table from 1,000 writes per second to 100,000 writes per second using the AWS Management Console.
• Easy administration. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully-managed service. You don’t need to worry about hardware or software provisioning, setup and configuration, software patching, operating a reliable, distributed database cluster, or partitioning data over multiple instances as you scale.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon DynamoDB Page.

AWS Free Usage Tier Now Includes Amazon ElastiCache

We are excited to announce that starting March 2013, the AWS Free Usage Tier will include Amazon ElastiCache nodes. With this announcement, customers can gain hands-on-experience with Amazon ElastiCache at no-cost. Customers eligible for the AWS Free Usage tier can now use up to 750 hours per month of a t1.micro cache node.

The expanded Free Usage Tier with Amazon ElastiCache t1.micro cache nodes is available today in all regions, except for Asia Pacific (Sydney) and AWS GovCloud. For more information about the AWS Free Usage Tier, please visit the AWS Free Usage Tier page. To get started using Amazon ElastiCache, visit the Amazon ElastiCache detail page.

Announcing New Lower Pricing for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

We are excited to announce a reduction in reserved instance pricing for Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Linux/UNIX Reserved Instance prices will decrease by up to 27 % for Amazon EC2 for the Standard (M1), Second-Generation Standard (M3), High-Memory (M2), and High-CPU (C1) Instance families. New Reserved Instance prices will only apply to Reserved Instances purchases made on or after March 5th. Today’s price drop represents the 26th price drop for AWS, and we are delighted to continue to pass along savings to you as we innovate and drive down our costs.

With the new pricing, Reserved Instances will provide savings of up to 65 % compared to On-Demand instances, and you will automatically receive additional savings on your future purchases of Reserved Instances in that AWS Region when you have more than $250,000 in active upfront Reserved Instances. We recommend that you take this opportunity to review your current usage and to determine if you would like to purchase additional Reserved Instances.

To learn more, please visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page for the complete list of new lower prices and an overview of the volume discount program. For more details on optimizing your AWS costs, please visit the AWS Economics Center. And during the month of March you can take advantage of a free trial of AWS Trusted Advisor to generate a personalized report on how you can optimize your bill by taking advantage of the new, lower Reserved Instance prices.

Announcing point-and-click access to Amazon RDS database logs

We are pleased to announce a significantly easier way for you to monitor a number of log files generated by your Amazon RDS DB Instances. You so far had the option to monitor most of these database logs by querying the database. You can now view database log files directly using the AWS Management Console or download them using Amazon RDS APIs to diagnose, trouble shoot and fix database configuration or performance issues. This functionality is available for all the database engines supported by Amazon RDS -- MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server.

You have three different ways to access the log files using the AWS Management Console or Amazon RDS APIs:

• View: You can view the content of a log file as of a point in time in the AWS Management Console. Just navigate to the "logs" section corresponding to your DB Instance, select the log file you are interested in and click "View".
• Watch: You can obtain real time updates to log files directly using the AWS Management Console. Just navigate to the "logs" section corresponding to your DB Instance, select the log file you are interested in and click "Watch". You will then be able to see the last few lines of the log file and any ongoing updates being made by the database engine as they occur.
• Download: You can use the rds-download-db-logfile command to download the content of your log files. Note that this functionality is not currently available through the AWS Management Console. Visit the Downloading a Database Log File section of the Amazon RDS User Guide to learn more.

The type of log files available through this functionality by database engine are as follows:

• MySQL: You can monitor MySQL Error Log, Slow Query Log and General Log directly through the AWS Management Console or Amazon RDS APIs. While the MySQL Error Log is generated by default, you need to configure DB Parameter Groups to enable the generation of Slow Query and General Logs to the file system. All these log files are rotated every hour and only the files corresponding to the last 24 hours are retained. Visit the Working with MySQL Database Log Files section of the User Guide to learn more.
• Oracle: You can access Alert Log and Trace Files directly through the AWS Management Console or Amazon RDS APIs. These files are retained for seven days by default. You can configure the retention period as per your needs. Visit the Working with Oracle Database Log Files section of the User Guide to learn more.
• SQL Server: You can access Error Log, Agent Log and Trace Files directly through the AWS Management Console or Amazon RDS APIs. These files are retained for seven days by default. You can configure the retention period as per your needs. Visit the Working with SQL Server Database Log Files section of the User Guide to learn more.

Amazon SQS and SNS Announce Lower Prices and Expanded Free Tiers - 50% price drop for SQS

We have good news to share. Effective March 1, 2013, we are reducing prices and expanding the free tier for AWS messaging services – the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS).

1. SQS API prices will decrease by 50% to $0.50 per million API requests.
2. SNS API prices will decrease by 17% to $0.50 per million API requests.
3. The SQS and SNS free tiers will each expand to 1 million free API requests per month, up 10X from 100K requests per month.

Our customers constantly discover powerful new ways to build more scalable, elastic and reliable applications using SQS and SNS. We learned, for example, that some customers use SQS as a buffer ahead of their databases and other services. Other customers combine SNS + SQS to fanout/transmit identical messages to multiple queues.

Over time, we've optimized our own systems in order to lower costs, and make SQS and SNS available for new customers and new workloads. Price cuts coupled with SQS features such as long polling (which reduces extraneous polling) and extensions to AmazonSQSAsyncClient (enables easier batching of outgoing messages, and also pre-fetching of incoming messages) give our customers a very cost-effective solution for their messaging needs. SQS can be even more cost effective for customers that use batching as SQS batches cost the same amount as single messages.

We are happy to pass along these savings to you as we continue to innovate and drive down our costs. The expanded free tier and lower prices will be available in all regions except GovCloud.

To learn more or get started with SQS and SNS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/sqs and http://aws.amazon.com/sns.

Amazon CloudSearch Now Available in Three Additional Regions Worldwide

We are excited to announce that Amazon CloudSearch is now available in the the US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. These new Regions join the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, and the recently added EU (Ireland) Region.

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, developers simply create a search domain, upload the data they want to make searchable to Amazon CloudSearch, and the service then automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys a highly tuned search index.

Getting started with Amazon CloudSearch is easy with our free trial program. To learn more, see the Amazon CloudSearch Page.

Announcing AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server - Beta

We are excited to announce the beta release of AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server. AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server is an easy to use tool that you can run on your EC2 Windows Server instances. It is a very valuable tool not just for collecting log files and troubleshooting issues, but also proactively identifying possible areas of concern.

This tool can, for example, be used to diagnose configuration mismatch issues between the Windows Firewall and the Amazon EC2 security group that may affect your applications. It can even examine EBS boot volumes from other instances and collect relevant logs for troubleshooting Windows Server from the volume.

The AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server is free for AWS Customer. You can learn more about it at http://aws.amazon.com/windows/awsdiagnostics/. Also note that this tool is in beta release and your feedback will be extremely useful in further improving this tool. You can give us feedback here.

Announcing New AWS CloudFormation Deployment Enhancements

We are excited to announce new AWS CloudFormation deployment enhancements and expanded support for EBS-Optimized instances. AWS CloudFormation makes it easy for you to provision and configure a set of related resources, including installing and configuring software on your Amazon EC2 instances.

Rolling Deployments for Auto Scaling Groups

You can now define update policies on Auto Scaling groups in CloudFormation templates. These update policies describe how instances in the Auto Scaling group are replaced or modified as part of a stack update operation. Update policies give you control over the number of instances that can be modified concurrently, the number of instances that should remain in service, and the wait time between instances to be updated. With rolling deployments, you reduce downtime when updating your application.

To learn more about update policies for Auto Scaling, see the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

Cancel and Rollback Action for Stack Updates

AWS CloudFormation now supports the ability to cancel a stack update. Using the cancel action, you can interrupt the stack update operation and trigger a rollback. The cancel action can be used in concert with update policies to automate the cancellation and rollback of a deployment. As you apply updates to your Auto Scaling group, you can validate your deployment and decide to cancel the operation.

To learn more about the cancel action, visit the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

EBS-Optimized Instances for Auto Scaling Groups

Starting today, you can also provision EBS-optimized instances inside Auto Scaling groups using CloudFormation templates. EBS-optimized instances provide dedicated throughput to Amazon EBS and an optimized configuration stack to provide optimal EBS I/O performance.

To learn more about how you can leverage EBS-optimized instances for Auto Scaling groups, visit the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

Announcing AWS OpsWorks

We are excited to announce AWS OpsWorks, a new application management service for managing applications of any scale or complexity on the AWS cloud. OpsWorks features an integrated experience for managing the complete application lifecycle, including resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, software updates, monitoring, and access control.

Three key attributes of OpsWorks are:

Operational Control. OpsWorks promotes conventions and sane defaults, such as template security groups. It also supports the ability to customize any aspect of an application’s configuration. Developers can reproduce exact configurations on new instances and apply changes to all instances, ensuring consistency.

Automation. OpsWorks uses automation to simplify operations. Users can leverage its event-driven configuration system and rich deployment tools to efficiently manage an application over its lifetime. OpsWorks supports customizable deployments, rollback, patch management, auto scaling, and auto healing. Application updates can be deployed by updating a single configuration and clicking a button, reducing the time spent on routine tasks.

Flexibility. OpsWorks supports a wide variety of application architectures and any software with a scripted installation. Because OpsWorks uses the Chef framework, developers can use existing recipes or leverage hundreds of community-built configurations.

A few clicks in the AWS Management Console are all it takes to get your first application running on AWS OpsWorks. You can learn more by visiting the AWS OpsWorks detail page or joining our Introduction to AWS OpsWorks webinar on March 18, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST.

Amazon Redshift Now Available to All Customers

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Amazon Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools.

Amazon Redshift is optimized for analyzing data sets of several hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and can provide significantly better performance at less than one tenth the price of most data warehousing solutions available to you today. On-demand pricing starts at $0.85 per hour for a 2-terabyte data warehouse, scaling linearly to a petabyte or more. Reserved instance pricing lowers the effective price to $0.228 per hour or under $1,000 per terabyte per year. Amazon Redshift also frees you from all the muck associated with provisioning, monitoring, backing up, patching, securing, and scaling your data warehouse.

Amazon Redshift is available in US East (N. Virginia) with additional regions coming soon. To learn more, visit the Amazon Redshift detail page.

Amazon RDS Reduces Price of Multi-AZ Deployments

We have good news to share. Effective at the beginning of this month (February 1, 2013), Amazon RDS is lowering Multi-AZ deployment prices globally for MySQL and Oracle editions.

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments offer enhanced availability for your production database workloads. When a database is run as a Multi-AZ deployment, Amazon RDS operates a standby instance which maintains an up-to-date copy of the primary database. In case of an instance, storage, or network failure, Amazon RDS automatically initiates a failover from the primary to the standby. This ensures minimal database availability impact to your application.

Today, many customers run production workloads on Amazon RDS as Multi-AZ deployments. However, we also know that there are many customers who‘ve wanted to run Amazon RDS Multi-AZ but haven’t been able to do so yet at the current price. So, we’re excited to lower our Amazon RDS Multi-AZ to make it even easier for customers to run production databases on Amazon RDS as Multi-AZ deployments.

For your quick reference, new pricing for an M1.Small instance for On-demand MySQL and Oracle (BYOL) Multi-AZ deployments is shown in table 1 below.

Table 1: Amazon RDS for MYSQL and Oracle BYOL On-Demand Multi-AZ Deployment Prices for M1.Small DB Instance

To learn more about Amazon RDS Multi-AZ and our new prices, please visit Amazon RDS .

Sincerely,
The Amazon Relational Database Service Team

Announcing DNS Failover for Amazon Route 53

We are excited to announce the release of DNS Failover for Route 53, Amazon’s Domain Name System (DNS) web service. With DNS Failover, Amazon Route 53 can help detect an outage of your website and redirect your end users to alternate locations where your application is operating properly. When you enable this feature, Route 53 health-checking agents will monitor each location (or "endpoint") of your application to determine its availability. In the event an endpoint fails, Route 53 will route traffic away from the failed endpoint and to other, healthy endpoints. This helps add redundancy to your applications and maintain high availability for your end users.

You can take advantage of Amazon Route 53’s traffic management capabilities to improve the availability of your applications. For example, if you host your website on Amazon EC2, you can now leverage a simple backup site hosted on Amazon S3. You can also run your primary application simultaneously in multiple AWS regions around the world, with Route 53 automatically removing from service any region where your application is unavailable.

Getting started is easy, and there are no upfront costs. See the Route 53 product page for full details and pricing.

To get started with DNS Failover for Route 53, read Jeff Barr’s blog post, visit the Route 53 product page, or review our walkthrough in the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

AWS CloudFormation Supports Tags for Amazon RDS and Amazon S3

We are excited to announce that AWS CloudFormation now supports tags for Amazon RDS and Amazon S3 resources. AWS CloudFormation makes it easy for you to provision and configure a set of related resources. Tagged resources allow you to view your AWS usage based on your business dimensions (such as cost centers, application names, or owners). With cost allocation reports, you can also track your AWS costs by tag.

CloudFormation automatically adds preset tags to your EC2, S3, and RDS resources. These preset tags contain the stack name and ID. Additionally, you can specify your custom tags at the stack level and have them propagate to all resources. Alternatively, you can specify tags for specific resources in your template, allowing you fine-grained control over what resources get tagged.

To learn more about tagging resources in CloudFormation, visit the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

Amazon RDS Announces Support for DB Event Notifications via Email and SMS

Price reduction for Amazon EC2, global expansion of M3 Standard Instances, and reduced data transfer pricing.

We have a trio of announcements today that will help you run your applications globally at a reduced cost.

1. Global Expansion of Second Generation Standard Instances
Last year, we announced Second Generation Standard (M3) instances. M3 instances have the same CPU and memory ratio as First Generation Standard (M1) instances but provide more CPU capability, and the option of an instance type with 8 virtual cores. In this initial launch, M3 instances were only available in the Northern Virginia region, but now you can launch instances as On Demand, Reserved or Spot instances in the Oregon, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and GovCloud (US) regions as well. We will launch M3 instances in the São Paulo region in the coming weeks. For more on M3 instances, please visit the Amazon EC2 instance type page.

2. Price reduction for Amazon EC2
We are reducing Linux On Demand prices for First Generation Standard (M1) instances, Second Generation Standard (M3) instances, High Memory (M2) instances and High CPU (C1) instances in all regions. All prices are effective from February 1, 2013. These reductions vary by instance type and region, but typically average 10-20% price drops . For complete pricing details, please visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page.

3. Reduced Data Transfer Pricing
We are reducing prices for data transfer between AWS locations. Our new lower pricing applies to data transfer between all 9 global AWS regions, and from AWS regions to all global CloudFront edge locations. Previously, we have charged normal internet bandwidth prices for data transfer, but are now lowering these charges significantly -- allowing you to even more cost effectively move data between regions for serving customers in local geographies, for disaster recovery, and for many other use cases. The new prices are effective February 1, 2013, and you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of these new prices. To learn more, please visit the Amazon S3 pricing page.

Amazon Simple Workflow in Seven Additional Regions and Extends IAM Support

We are pleased to announce that Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) is now available in seven additional AWS regions. In addition, you can also now use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control permissions to SWF domains and APIs.

With domain-level permissions, you can control access to individual SWF domains you’ve defined such as development, QA, and production regions. For example, if you have an operations team that uses a web-based app to interact with automated workflows, you can now control which employees can view workflows and limit which employees may stop, start, or interrupt them. With API permissions you can control access to individual APIs within those domains. If your organization has workflows that operate on sensitive information, you can enforce a policy that makes sure only automated processes with the appropriate permissions can execute these workflows.

With the addition of seven new regions, you can help reduce latency and improve your applications’ performance by choosing to run Amazon SWF workflows in the AWS region that is closest to your users and processes. To learn more about all AWS offerings and locations, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page.

To learn more about SWF, visit the the SWF page. To learn more about extended IAM functionality with SWF please read Jeff Barr's blog for an overview and our Developer Guide for details. To learn ore about IAM, visit the the IAM page.

Announcing Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Amazon Web Services is excited to announce the beta release of Amazon Elastic Transcoder, a new AWS service that makes it easy to convert video between different digital media formats in the cloud. Amazon Elastic Transcoder is designed to transcode videos from popular formats that are stored in Amazon S3 into versions that will work on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs. Amazon Elastic Transcoder provides you an easy, cost effective way to get high quality video on an increasing array of devices without having to become an expert in video or using expensive software.

As with all Amazon Web Services, you pay only for what you use, and there are no up-front expenses or long-term commitments.

We built Amazon Elastic Transcoder to be:

• Easy-to-use – Amazon Elastic Transcoder is designed to be very simple to use. You can easily get started by using the AWS Management Console or the API. System transcoding presets make it easy to get transcoding settings right the first time for popular devices and formats.
• Low cost – Amazon Elastic Transcoder has easy to understand pricing: you pay according to the duration of your video. Prices start at just $0.015/minute for Standard Definition content, and $0.030/minute for High Definition content with no minimums or monthly commitments. Plus, you can use Amazon Elastic Transcoder as part of AWS' free usage tier that lets you transcode up to 20 minutes of SD video or 10 minutes of HD video a month free of charge. To see terms and additional information, please visit the AWS Free Usage Tier page.
• Highly scalable – Amazon Elastic Transcoder scales to meet your growing and often unpredictable video transcoding requirements.
• Secure – You store your content in your own Amazon S3 buckets so you only give us access to what you want to transcode. Amazon Elastic Transcoder also makes use of AWS security best practices.

You can get started at aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console.

You can learn more by visiting the Amazon Elastic Transcoder detail page or joining our Introduction to Amazon Elastic Transcoder webinar on February 27, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST.

Announcing High Memory Cluster Instances for Amazon EC2

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of High Memory Cluster Eight Extra Large (cr1.8xlarge) instances for Amazon EC2. This new Amazon EC2 instance type is ideal for applications that benefit from a high level of memory capacity, computational power and network bandwidth. High Memory Cluster instances provide customers with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2670 8-core processors, 244 GiB of RAM, 240 GB of SSD-based instance storage, and high bandwidth networking with support for cluster placement groups. Customers can use these instances for a variety of memory-intensive applications including in-memory databases and analytics, graph and stream processing, engineering design, and scientific computing.

High Memory Cluster instances are currently available in three availability zones in the US East (N. Virginia) region. Support for other regions is planned for the coming months. You can learn more about the specifications and capabilities of High Storage instances for Amazon EC2 by visiting the Amazon EC2 instance type page. Detailed pricing information is available on the EC2 pricing page.

AWS Storage Gateway Announces Gateway for Amazon EC2

In October, we launched Gateway-Cached volumes for AWS Storage Gateway. This capability provides you with the ability to store your application’s primary data in Amazon S3 while retaining frequently accessed data on-premises in the form of a Gateway-Cached volume. We’re excited to announce that AWS Storage Gateway for EC2 is now in the AWS Marketplace.

This gives you a cloud-hosted solution that can mirror your entire production environment in case your on-premises infrastructure goes down or if you choose to add additional on-demand compute capacity. You can now make an EBS snapshot copy of a Gateway-Cached volume available to an EC2 instance of your on-premise application using AWS Storage Gateway in EC2. Using Amazon EC2, you can configure virtual machine images of your application servers in AWS. When you have a DR scenario or you need additional compute capacity, you can launch your application EC2 instances and an AWS Storage Gateway in EC2. You can then restore a snapshot from your on-premises Gateway-Cached volume to a new volume for your AWS Storage Gateway in EC2, connect your EC2 application instances to your restored volume through iSCSI, and your DR or on-demand environment is up and running. You only pay for these servers when you need them, so you can have your DR or on-demand environment at the ready without having to pay for capacity when it’s not in use.

Learn more and get started by visiting the AWS Storage Gateway User Guide.

Amazon RDS Now Provides the Ability to Rename Database Instances

• Assume the name and endpoint of an existing DB Instance: Amazon RDS provides multiple options for data recovery include Point in Time Recovery, Read Replica Promotion, and Restore from DB Snapshot. With the ability to “Rename”, you can now have these “new” DB Instances assume the identity of an existing DB Instance, thus allowing you to avoid updating your applications with a new endpoint.
• Create a new name and endpoint for an existing DB Instance: As your applications grow on Amazon RDS, the role of your DB Instances may evolve. “Rename” functionality will allow you to keep the names of your DB Instances in sync with the new roles your instances may take on.

Amazon SNS Announces Support for 64KB Payloads

We're pleased to announce support for 64KB payloads in SNS. Previously, SNS notifications were capped at 32KB. Customers tell us larger payloads will enable new use cases that were previously difficult to accomplish. When subscribing SQS queues to SNS topics, customers can now take advantage of the full 64kb payloads that SQS allows.

64KB SNS payloads are available today in all regions.

Getting started with Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS is easy with our free tiers of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon SNS page and the Amazon SQS page.

Use Amazon CloudWatch to Detect and Shut Down Unused Amazon EC2 Instances

We are pleased to announce that starting today you can use Amazon CloudWatch alarms to detect and shut down unused Amazon EC2 instances automatically. Whether you are an individual developer who uses an Amazon EC2 instance for occasional projects, or an IT professional who manages many Amazon EC2 instances for multiple developers, you can now use Amazon CloudWatch to avoid accumulating unnecessary usage charges.

Stop or Terminate EC2 Instances That are Unused or Underutilized

Amazon CloudWatch collects monitoring data for your AWS resources and applications. Amazon CloudWatch alarms help you react quickly to issues by emailing a notification to you or executing automated tasks when data values reach a threshold you set. Starting today, you can also set alarms that automatically stop or terminate Amazon EC2 instances that have gone unused or underutilized for too long. For example, a student who wants to stay within the AWS Free Usage Tier can set an alarm that automatically stops an instance once it has been left idle for an hour. Or, if you are a corporate IT administrator, you can create a group of alarms that first sends an email notification to developers whose instances have been underutilized for 8 hours, then terminates an instance and emails both of you if utilization doesn't improve after 24 hours.

Get Started Using Automated Shutdown Alarms Today

It's easy to set Amazon CloudWatch alarms that detect and shut down idle Amazon EC2 instances. To get started, first visit Amazon EC2 in the AWS Management Console, select an instance, and click the 'Create Alarm' button in the Monitoring tab that appears in the lower panel. Then, enter an email address to notify, choose 'Stop' or 'Terminate', set a utilization threshold that suits your needs, and you're done. If the threshold is ever reached, Amazon CloudWatch will shut down the instance and email you a notification.

You can also set these alarms using the Amazon CloudWatch console, AWS SDKs, Amazon CloudWatch API, and command-line interface. For more information, visit Create Alarms That Stop or Terminate an Instance in the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.

AWS Management Console Announces Tablet and Mobile Support

We are pleased to announce the AWS Management Console now supports tablet devices. The Management Console lets you access and manage Amazon Web Services through a simple and intuitive web-based user interface. You can access the Management Console using your tablet’s web browser to view some of the changes we’re making that put your information front and center, such as full-screen wizards and tables, and a new monitoring view. To learn more about our tablet changes, please see our What's New guide or visit the Management Console.

We are also pleased to announce the availability of the AWS Management Console app for Android phones. You can use this companion mobile app to quickly and easily view and manage your existing EC2 instances and CloudWatch alarms from your phone. To learn more or download the app, please visit our mobile detail page.

Amazon ElastiCache Announces Auto Discovery Client For PHP

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Amazon ElastiCache Cluster Client for PHP. This Client supports Auto Discovery, a novel way to connect to your Amazon ElastiCache cluster. Auto Discovery enables automatic discovery of cache nodes by clients when the nodes are added to or removed from an ElastiCache cluster.

As before, Amazon ElastiCache remains protocol-compliant with Memcached, a widely adopted memory object caching system, so code, applications, and popular tools that you use today with existing Memcached environments will continue to work seamlessly with Auto Discovery.

To get started you will need the Amazon ElastiCache Cluster Client which is now available for both Java and PHP and can be downloaded from the Amazon ElastiCache Console.